The Girl (BBC Two) was about Alfred Hitchcock’s obsession with one of his leading ladies, Tippi Hedren. In a less PC age the producers might have been tempted to call it The Bird – Hitchcock was, after all, a Cockney – but even then they’d probably have decided against it. The Bird would have led viewers to expect levity and playfulness, qualities absent from this airless misery of a biopic.

The Girl wanted you – indeed, instructed you – to think that Hitchcock was one of those warped artistic geniuses who, while bringing pleasure to millions of strangers, brought only hurt to those who know them. This Hitchcock, as played by Toby Jones (Infamous, Frost/Nixon), was a corpulent lech, a wheezing jowly pitiful bulldog pawing at his repulsed female stars in the back of his limo. His sole redeeming feature was a knack for turning out successful films, which is why everyone put up with his awfulness.

Still, post-Savile, viewers may have been even more than usually receptive to a film depicting a celebrated figure from the past as a bullying groper. Hedren (played by Sienna Miller) was Hitchcock’s star in The Birds and Marnie, and according to this portrayal his efforts to seduce her were as sinister as his films.

He would discomfort her by reciting obscene limericks, and by leering at her in front of his wife. Watching her on set, as her character was attacked or kissed, he looked more like a voyeur than a director. Even his attempts at romance were oppressive (“The moon is full tonight. Reminds me of my favourite fantasy about you…”). Each time she rejected his clammy advances, he called her frigid.

Finally he resorted to flat demands. “I want you to make yourself available to me sexually at all times… I think that’s a fair reward for what I’ve done for you.” She refused. He vowed to ruin her career.

It was hard to see why he was so desperate to sleep with her, or for that matter anyone. He didn’t seem in the least passionate – just domineering and embittered. It was as if to him sex were not an expression of love but a form of vengeance for some unspecified crime. Perhaps the crime of being young, female and beautiful.

Unable to exact that form of vengeance on Hedren, he exacted another by intimidating her on set. Directing a scene in which her character stands in a phone box, without warning he arranged for a large model bird to come flying at her; it shattered the glass and left her cowering. In another scene he made her fend off attacks from real birds, for dozens and dozens of takes. By the end she was caked in blood – her own, not make-up. The message was simple: hot blondes were the victims in his films, and the victims in his life.

The Girl gave few clues why Hitchcock was like this, if indeed he was (the real Hedren, who was thanked in The Girl’s credits, has said he did sexually harass her). But, true or untrue as biography, it felt untrue as drama: monotonous in mood, narrow in characterisation, didactic in its campaign to prove the artist a monster.